About : Deep City was born first as a photo-montage and script for the Microsoft Social Symposium of early 2010 on “smart cities”. When I was 19, I was accepted in an architecture course, chose product design instead but stayed fascinated by cities and their ability to shape us and our understanding of the world. The eBook is a further exploration a year after that talk, to try to extract the individual elements we see in cities over and over again, to help me develop some sort of vocabulary for the cities I know and love, building blocks that make them all melt into one another. I used the photographs I have been taking in the cities I have lived in and visited for the past 5 years or so.

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is a product & interaction designer interested in the potential of smart & connected objects (sometimes known as the internet of things). She runs Tinker London, a design studio in East London, talks about emotional robots for Lirec.eu and works on her own projects at designswarm.com

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About : A collaborative eBook produced by the participants of City As Material : Skyline (12th November 2010) – Ancient Lights, City Shadows contains the traces of a walk around the City of London, which flow through the book as a a skyline of altitude measurements punctuated with drawings and photographs created along the way. Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #cityasmaterial

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About : an ebook documenting the audio recordings made on the fifth City As Material : Sonic Geographies event, 10th December 2010. Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #cityasmaterial

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About : a final eBook about Alice Angus’ new project, As It Comes commissioned by Mid Pennine Arts and Lancaster District Chamber of Commerce for their Talking Shop series. An exploration of the independent shops and market stall traders of Lancaster, Alice has created a series of drawings that are printed on 2 metre long cotton banners with hand-embroidered details, which are hung in the windows of a shop at 18 New Street on from the 10th November to 16th December 2010.
Also available as a PPOD printed book.

Published December 2010

Alice Angus, co-director of Proboscis, is an artist inspired by rethinking concepts and perceptions of landscape and human relationships to the land. Over the last six years she has been creating a body of art work exploring concepts proximity and remoteness, technology and presence, against the lived experience and local knowledge of a place. In 2003, Alice was the only non-Canadian to participate in the ﬁrst Artist in the Park residency in Ivvavik National Park in the Northern Yukon, organised by Parks Canada.

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About : DodoLab has collaborated with the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) on the creation of A New Workers Songbook. The project is based on WAHC’s collection of books and recordings of songs that reflect Hamilton’s history of industry and organized labour. The goal of this project is to create songs about current realities for working people in Hamilton. Reflecting on the shifts in jobs and work, this participatory and process-based project explores current perceptions from both an individual and collective perspective. Artist/curator Caitlin Sutherland has worked with DodoLab on the design of the installation and the various surveys and has also been the lead on statistical research. Hamilton artist, performer and musician Tor Lukasik-Foss is the lead on the songwriting component of the project he has designed this workbook to help aspiring songwriters to create their own worker’s songs.

Published December 2010

Tiny Bill Cody (Tor Lukasik-Foss) is an artist, performer and musician based in Hamilton, Ontario.

DodoLab is an art and design based program that employs experimental and adaptive processes to spark positive change and resiliency. We work collaboratively with a diversity of emergent thinkers/doers to imaginatively and critically repurpose familiar tools of the social sciences, marketing and activism to engage with the public in public. Our focus is the complex relationships between people and their surroundings and how communities define, and are defined by, their environment. DodoLab puts the creative process at the heart of confronting social and environmental challenges.

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About : This book documents some of the research and traders involved in Alice Angus’ As It Comes project exploring independent shops and traders in Lancaster, England. It was made by Caroline Maclennan, a local student at Lancaster University who worked with Alice and also includes work with local historian Michael Winstanley who collaborated with Alice. As It Comes was commissioned by Mid Pennine Arts for their Talking Shop regeneration programme, and was supported by the Lancaster District Chamber of Commerce.

Published December 2010

Caroline Maclennan is a History of Art and Fine Art student at the University of Lancaster specialising in installation and digital art. Caroline undertook a creative placement on Alice Angus’ As It Comes project in Summer / Autumn 2010.

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About : On Friday, November 12th, 2010, DodoLab and SACY (Sudbury Action Centre for Youth) staged the First Annual Tournament of Beasts in Sudbury’s Memorial Park (Ontario, Canada). The project featured a croquet competition between a half-dozen animals (raccoon, bear, wolf, rabbit, deer and moose) and was staged as a catalyst to encourage public discussion about the use and control of public spaces. The project is part of a larger community initiative in Sudbury being developed in collaboration with the Musagetes Foundation, Ontario Trillium Foundation, SACY, Carrefour Sudbury and Metis Council of Sudbury.

Published November 2010

DodoLab is an art and design based program that employs experimental and adaptive processes to spark positive change and resiliency. We work collaboratively with a diversity of emergent thinkers/doers to imaginatively and critically repurpose familiar tools of the social sciences, marketing and activism to engage with the public in public. Our focus is the complex relationships between people and their surroundings and how communities define, and are defined by, their environment. DodoLab puts the creative process at the heart of confronting social and environmental challenges.

About : an eBook and a set of StoryCubes about Alice Angus’ new project, As It Comes commissioned by Mid Pennine Arts and Lancaster District Chamber of Commerce for their Talking Shop series. An exploration of the independent shops and market stall traders of Lancaster, Alice has created a series of drawings that are printed on 2 metre long cotton banners with hand-embroidered details, which are hung in the windows of a shop at 18 New Street on from the 10th November to 16th December 2010.

Published November 2010

Alice Angus, co-director of Proboscis, is an artist inspired by rethinking concepts and perceptions of landscape and human relationships to the land. Over the last six years she has been creating a body of art work exploring concepts proximity and remoteness, technology and presence, against the lived experience and local knowledge of a place. In 2003, Alice was the only non-Canadian to participate in the ﬁrst Artist in the Park residency in Ivvavik National Park in the Northern Yukon, organised by Parks Canada.

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About : a notebook designed by Haz Tagiuri for participants in the Pitch In & Publish : City As Material event on Skyline to use to collect notes and ideas, paste in pictures and cuttings.
Includes a photo essay by Skyline’s event special guest, Simon Pope.

Book a place at Skyline (Friday 12th November) or one of the other forthcoming events, Underside & Sonic Geographies.

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About : a collaborative eBook created during the second City As Material Pitch In & Publish event on ‘River‘. Ebb and Flow documents a walk along the river from Hermitage Community Moorings in Wapping to Queenhithe and via the City to Turnmill Street (formerly on the banks of the now buried River Fleet) in Clerkenwell. Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #cityasmaterial

Book a place at one of the next events, on the topics of Skyline, Underside and Sonic Geographies.

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About : An eBook of photos celebrating the stories so far in the history of Cartoon de Salvo.

Published October 2010

Founded in 1997, Cartoon de Salvo is one of the country’s most respected theatre companies. Their cocktail of script-defying improvisation, live music and exceptional storytelling has won critical acclaim and a devoted following. On their quest to mess with the live theatre experience, the Salvos make theatre that wears its heart on its sleeve, that likes an adventure, and that never forgets that the audience is the number one reason for putting on the show. The company has played everywhere from tiny village halls in Cumbria to cliff tops in Cornwall, from proper producing houses to shopping malls, to Edinburgh, Glastonbury and Hong Kong International Festivals. Show include: Meat and Two Veg, The Sunflower Plot, their acclaimed allotment set outdoor theatre event and The Ratcatcher of Hamelin. In 2010 the Salvo’s are joining forces with producer Ed Collier (Fuel, China Plate, Arvon) and touring Pub Rock in urban boozers across the UK, making a new show about science and religion called The Irish Giant, creating a new music impro event called Made Up and taking completely unscripted Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories to the Kennedy Centre, Washington DC.

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About : a collaborative eBook created during the first City As Material Pitch In & Publish event on ‘Streetscapes‘. The Unbooklet of Disappropriation explores a journey around Smithfield, the Golden Lane estate, the Barbican and Postman’s Park and is focused around the discovery of an ‘Unplace’ with unusual acoustic properties. It has been designed not just as a document of the journey, but also as something which readers can use to add their own contributions to – by tearing out one of the pages and leaving their own messages in similar places, or using the Twitter hashtags (#cityasmaterial and #ddiof) to continue a distributed conversation.

Book a place at one of the next events, on the topics of River, Skyline, Underside and Sonic Geographies.

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About : A notebook compiled during a study visit to Germany to learn about Passivhaus building design principles. Created with a combination of note taking, Polaroid prints, QR codes and links to web content.

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About : an illustrated storyboard for a new film about Proboscis’ Sensory Threads project, illustrated by Many Tang and scripted by Karen Martin & Alice Angus.

Published September 2010

Mandy Tang recently joined Proboscis as a Creative Assistant on a 6 month placement supported by the Future Jobs Fund through New Deal of the Mind. She has worked on various iPhone games projects as a Junior Concept Artist and is currently interested in expanding her knowledge in the field of Creative Arts.

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10 years ago this month we published the very first series of Diffusion eBooks, Performance Notations, launching our particular brand of hand-made hybrid digital/paper publishing on an unsuspecting public. Over the past decade we have followed that series with several others of our own (and a few by partners and collaborators) such as : Species of Spaces, Liquid Geography, CODE, Short Work, Topographies and Tales & Transformations and published well over 400 eBooks (and nearly 200 StoryCubes too). In 2002 we published the design schematics allowing others to create their own Diffusion eBooks (with recent updates for all 4 design variations and right-to-left reading too) and followed that in 2006 with the first version of our online web application for creating eBooks & StoryCubes, the Diffusion Generator. Hundreds of eBooks and StoryCubes were created (not all published here) by its users over a two and a half-year period. For a more in depth history of Diffusion read this post from 2007.

In 2008 we won a small grant from the Technology Strategy Board to build a new prototype service that would be vastly more powerful and flexible than the old Generator – what eventually became bookleteer.com. The alpha version was launched at the end of September 2009 and we now have several hundred users who have created almost one thousand eBooks and StoryCubes with it during its first year, including some in languages such as Arabic and Hindi. In the past 6 months we’ve rolled out lots of new features, such as new sizes, customisable front covers and our exclusive Publish & Print On Demand service. We have also created a crowdfunding scheme for collaborators, partners and friends to support bookleteer’s technical development, Alpha Club. We’ve run a series of events, Pitch Up & Publish, introducing bookleteer to new users – both in our own studio in Clerkenwell and around the country with the Empty Shops Network.

To kick-off Diffusion’s next decade we’re devising a new series of events, Pitch In & Publish, and adopting a new model of participatory publishing for our curated series. Rather than selecting individuals to create eBooks as we have done for previous series we will host events where people can collaborate in designing and creating a series of publications with others. Proboscis will define the series theme and individual topics for each issue, which will be put together during a one-day event. We will be publishing the collaborative publications (which could be an eBook or a series of StoryCubes) on this site and we will be inviting the participants to use bookleteer to create their own personal contributions to the series. A limited edition run of the publication will be printed using the PPOD service for participants. Pitch In & Publish will launch in October 2010 with the first series, City As Material. Topics will include: river, streetscapes, skyline and underside.

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About : Graffito is an iPhone/iPad app for collaborative drawing, an experiment in massive crowd-made graffiti. This eBook introduces the project and the team behind it, with photos and screengrabs of it in action at 2010’s Vintage@Goodwood festival.

About : Alice Angus and Joyce Majiski created this StoryCube set for Topographies and Tales. They are designed to be played with, used as a thinking tool for ideas about landscape, navigation, myths and environments, belonging and home. Pile them up together, throw them like dice, arrange into maps, build into landscapes of stories…

Topographies and Tales is about the relationship between people, identity and place. It unearths local and personal stories and myths exploring how concepts of landscape are shaped by ideas of belonging and home.

It is a personal exploration of the intimate way people form relationships with their environments, it takes a journey through the tall tales and perceptions the artists encountered on their travels in the west of Scotland and the Yukon.

Topographies and Tales was a long term collaboration between Alice Angus and Canadian artist Joyce Majiski, that included a film, creative lab and publications. The collaboration began in 2003 in Ivvavik National Park in the Canadian Arctic then in Glenmore Lodge in the Cairngorm Mountains, Scotland, the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture in Dawson City, Canada, Joyce’s Tuktu Studio in Whitehorse and the Proboscis Studio in London.

Alice Angus, co-director of Proboscis, is an artist inspired by rethinking concepts and perceptions of landscape and human relationships to the land. Over the last six years she has been creating a body of art work exploring concepts proximity and remoteness, technology and presence, against the lived experience and local knowledge of a place. In 2003, Alice was the only non-Canadian to participate in the ﬁrst Artist in the Park residency in Ivvavik National Park in the Northern Yukon, organised by Parks Canada.

Joyce Majiski is an artist, biologist, naturalist and guide whose work with printmaking, installations, artists books and video focuses on the natural world and relationships between nature and humans. Her recent projects include the groundbreaking Three Rivers project where the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Service invited prominent artists, writers and journalists to join native people on three simultaneous journeys along the Snake, the Wind, and the Bonnet Plume rivers. www.joycemajiski.com

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About : An eBook detailing the work Karine did with Proboscis during her Future Jobs Fund placement in Spring and Summer 2010.

Published September 2010

Karine Dorset worked as a Communications Assistant at Proboscis on a Future Jobs Fund placement. Originally trained as a chef, she is broadening her creative horizons and exploring other forms of creativity.

About : A scrapbook of screen grabs from the Graffito iPhone/iPad App as used by festival-goers in the Warehouse Tent at Vintage in Goodwood Park. The images were captured live and printed out via Bluetooth on a Polaroid PoGo printer and stuck into an eNotebook during the event by Jennifer Sheridan (project leader of Graffito) – working from the control booth. See more photos of it in action on Flickr. The ScrapBook is a tangible souvenir for any of the people who played with Graffito at the Festival to have as a memento of the experience they took part in. We’ll be exploring other ways to use bookleteer, eBooks and StoryCubes to make more personalised tangible souvenirs for Graffito users in the near future.

Make Your Own Graffito ScrapBook
If you have an iPhone or iPad, download Graffito free from the AppStore, play and draw with it, capture your favourite images as they happen and print out the pictures to stick in your own Graffito ScrapBook.

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About : Ode to Dawson is an artists book made mostly using print-based methods, including digital, linoleum and monoprint techniques. The book also includes sewing, beading, drawing and painting contributions. Co-ordinated and created by Joyce Majiski and John Steins (with 41 contributors) Ode to Dawson was created during the Riverside Arts Festival in Dawson City, Yukon August, 2010

Published August 2010

Joyce Majiski is an artist, biologist, naturalist and guide whose work with printmaking, installations, artists books and video focuses on the natural world and relationships between nature and humans. Her recent projects include the groundbreaking Three Rivers project where the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Service invited prominent artists, writers and journalists to join native people on three simultaneous journeys along the Snake, the Wind, and the Bonnet Plume rivers. www.joycemajiski.com

About : A book describing the progress of the Berber-Abidiya Archaeological Project in Dangeil, Sudan. The project, “has focused on the late Kushite city of Dangeil (third century BC – fourth century AD). The site is endangered by modern development. Dangeil is located 350km north of Khartoum and has been a mystery to modern archaeologists because of its unique appearance, though in actuality few have ever visited the site. It consists of a series of large discrete mounds, many standing over four metres above the surrounding plain.”

Published August 2010

Julie Anderson is Assistant Keeper of Egyptian and Sudanese Antiquities at the British Museum.

Salah Mohamed Ahmed is Director of Field Work for the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, Sudan.

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About : Having looked at the diverse range of published StoryCubes on the Diffusion and Bookleteer websites, I found that each had an inspiring story to tell or contained overlooked information to be acknowledged. But it wasn’t just the content of these publications which interested me, it was how the content was presented in the form of a cube.

When holding a cube you find yourself tempted to see whats on the other faces, with this in mind I decided to make a game which will go hand in hand with the eBooks. The concept of the game was fairly simple, from the starting point pick a path (line) and follow it around the cube until you reached a destination. Several paths would overlap, giving the player a choice to change direction. Once the player had reached a destination, they will use the eBook to find out its description.

With this idea it creates a different kind of interaction with the cube, instead of being guided by text, the player is free to choose and explore any chosen path. Or in some cases the player might try to work out a way to reach a specific destination.

Apart from readjusting the orientation of one or two pages, the eBook was fairly straightforward to make. Without the need of additional glue or staples and only using the slotting mechanism the finished eBook was very secure. Overall I had fun and enjoyed making the StoryCube with the eBook and look forward to seeing what other people create.

Published July 2010

Mandy Tang recently joined Proboscis as a Creative Assistant on a 6 month placement supported by the Future Jobs Fund through New Deal of the Mind. She has worked on various iPhone games projects as a Junior Concept Artist and is currently interested in expanding her knowledge in the field of Creative Arts.

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download. make up. share.

Diffusion is a free library of hybrid digital/physical publications for you to download, print out and make up, or read online.

There are 488 eBooks and 187 StoryCubes in the Library; from critical writing to short stories; ethnographic notebooks to artists books; classic essays to new commissions. Discover, download and enjoy.

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We need sponsors and supporters to help us continue expanding and developing both Diffusion and bookleteer.

Please help us maintain this site providing free downloads of a constantly growing array of eBooks and StoryCubes by sponsoring a series of commissions (e.g. Transformations), joining the bookleteer alpha club or simply making a donation via Paypal.